Confusing ceasefire.
To the naked eye, the U.S. and Iran seemed to be engaging in a shooting war again. But now they are ready to stop shooting for a while:
The U.S. and Iran have agreed to “stand down for now” and allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz after renewed fighting in the past few days, a U.S. official told The Hill on Sunday.
“Technical talks are slated to continue on all areas of the MOU. Both sides will stand down for now and vessels can move freely,” the official said, referring to the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by both sides earlier this month.
The Wall Street Journal calls the recent resumption of “kinetic” activity a “dangerous period of violence.” Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz fell as Iran claimed control, but now we are told it is resuming as talks are scheduled to continue in Qatar. The stock market is pleased early this morning.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal (“Iran Is Winning the Battle of Hormuz”) is less pleased. The editors take note of the brief resumption of “kinetic” activities, including Iran’s firing of missiles and drones at civilian targets and U.S. targets in Bahrain and Kuwait:
“It is very possible that they will never learn,” Mr. Trump wrote of Iran’s regime on Saturday night. Or is it U.S. decision makers who never learn? Vice President JD Vance has been touting Iran’s “transformed” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders ready to “turn over a new leaf” with the U.S. He even reached “gentlemen’s agreements” with them outside the memorandum, Mr. Vance assured critics.
Well, these are no gentlemen. It’s the same terrorist regime, and this is the Battle of Hormuz that Mr. Trump thought he had ducked. In case there was any doubt, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday that Iran is solely responsible for managing the Strait under the memorandum. He said “no other country has any responsibility in that regard.” Mr. Araghchi is Iran’s chief negotiator with Mr. Vance.
May I go back to a very germane column that appeared last week? The refrain of the Left is that Iran is stronger than it was before the U.S. attacked. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen asked a prominent nuclear scientist, David Albright, one of the leading experts on Iran’s nuclear program, about this claim:
“You’d have to be delirious to think that’s the case,” he told me in a podcast interview, adding later, “When we look at it strictly technically, this war was — whatever you feel about the war — was very successful in seriously setting back Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon.”
The New York Post lingo for the Mamdani socialists who swept to victory in New York primaries last week is “Candihates.” In an exclusive, the plucky tab reports:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist cronies who swept last week’s Democratic primaries boasted about an affordability message — but critics say it was an anti-Israel furor that is fueling the party’s swing to the left.
State Democratic Party Jay Jacobs admitted voters’ feelings on Israel helped propel Mamdani buddies to three House primary victories….
The pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel campaign was a “more important issue for those who came out and voted” in low-turnout primary elections that saw only about 17% of party voters citywide participate, Jacobs said.
[A statement from the Anti-Defamation League] noted that as Mamdani moved through the jubilant crowd at a DSA victory party on the night of the primaries, attendees chanted “From the River to the Sea,” the code viewed as a call to wipe out Israel.
“How the Left Abandoned the Jews” is the headline on a Free Press story by Commentary Editor John Podhoretz. The subtitle:
The victories of anti-Israel democratic socialists aren’t a break from Democratic politics. They’re the culmination of a 40-year ideological shift that party leaders tolerated—and often encouraged.
Noah Rothman writes in National Review about the “hostile takeover” of the Democratic Party by socialists that “everybody but the Democratic Party saw coming.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not just winning at the polls. He succeeded in getting a two-year freeze on New York rent. Wow, is this ever going to cost the city. Arpit Gupta writes about this in “The High Cost of New York’s Rent Freeze“:
In 1971, the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck offered a famous critique of rent control: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”…
The lesson is that freezing the price of a service indefinitely while its costs continue to rise does not produce cheap or abundant service. Instead, it produces deteriorating assets and, eventually, public bailouts and takeovers….
The protection offered by a stabilized lease is effectively a transferable property right, one that can be held for life and, in practice, is often passed down to other family members. A rent freeze increases the value of that right, turning the benefit into something closer to a lottery prize than targeted welfare assistance.
Any subsidy has to be paid for by someone. …
Socialism Spreads. Colorado Democrats brace for their own insurgent earthquake, as Senator Michael Bennet and Rep. Diana DeGette, a pair of longtime fixtures of state Democratic politics, face the possibility of being Mamdanied in tomorrow’s primaries.
In “Why Being ‘Progressive’ Is No Longer Enough on the Left,” Allysia Finley writes about leftist Democrats losing to Mamdani socialists who think they aren’t radical enough. Blinded by Trump Hatred: “Trump Opened the Window for the DSA.” Clifford Asness and Aaron Brown assert that “Democrats’ hatred for President Trump led them to tolerate radical, vicious ideas that are colonizing their party.”
What about 2028 hopeful Gavin Newsom? An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is headlined “The Socialist Wave, West Coast Version”:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom failed to persuade his union friends to drop their wealth tax from the November ballot, so now we’ll find out if he’ll spend political capital to defeat it or instead try to surf the socialist wave to the White House. Bet on the latter.
Meanwhile, New York Post columnist the aptly named Miranda Devine says Dems need a leader, but all they have is the “strangely detached” from a problem he helped create, Barack Obama. Only a handful of Dems are fighting against the red tide.
Europe is in the midst of a heat wave that has claimed many lives. Did you realize before the heatwave that most European buildings lack air conditioning?
Just 5% of British households and 24% of French ones have air conditioners at home. As intense, life-threatening heat waves become more common, that is starting to change. …
Europeans typically saw AC as an extravagance, a short-term fix that in fact would exacerbate the climate crisis it sought to remedy.
We’re expecting a dangerous heat wave in the U.S. For those who have air conditioning, it will be more tolerable than for our European counterparts. But It’s Good to Die for the Climate: The liberal Atlantic praises Europeans for sacrifice and suffering, while we churlish Americans turn on the AC.
Ms. Must has been searching for why many (most) feminists caved on the women’s sports issue. That’s only one issue where movement feminists haven’t supported women. Camila Long, a columnist with the Times of London, has written a piece on the feminist abandonment of women. I don’t have access to the Times, but fortunately Powerline reprints a goodly chunk of Long’s column.
Women’s sports isn’t the only target. Now, men who identify as “trans” women want to be Daughters:
About 200 members of the Daughters of the American Revolution gathered at a rally June 24 in Washington, D.C., ahead of a contentious Friday vote on the definition of “woman.” This vote comes after years of tension over whether or not trans-identified men should be allowed to become members of the woman-only society.
Since the controversy over trans involvement in DAR began, thousands of women have resigned from the organization, citing its transgender policy as a reason.
Because the bylaws did not explicitly define what “daughters” or “woman” meant, and due to a non-discrimination clause added to the bylaws in 2023, the DAR members advocating for women’s spaces faced an uphill battle.
We’ll celebrate our country’s 250th birthday Saturday. To prepare, I suggest Tevi Troy’s informative “Four Presidents, One Bicentennial“; the current celebration, Troy writes, is more muted than previous birthdays.
